Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (32 page)

Once You Go Black

The only service I attend the morning of Gay Pride is the service of mimosas on a silver tray on my roof deck. However, because Pride followed dead on my decision to cross over, I announced to Scott Whittier that I was going to attend the thirtieth annual ecumenical service sponsored by the Pride Interfaith Coalition. Scott announced in turn that he was going to get another boyfriend.

Founded in 1818, Union United Methodist Church is one of Boston’s oldest black churches. Little boys in starched shirts, men looking like a convention of funeral home directors, and regal women in cutthroat competition for the gaudiest hat typically surround it on weekend mornings. The Interfaith service was the first time I actually went inside. Shabby velvet cushions from that first service back in 1818 covered the pews. Their seams had popped, and the stuffing was sticking out. The carpets and prayer books looked equally worn. But for all their wear and tear, the music ministry made it new and brassy, rollicking and alive.

The service kicked off with a warm musical welcome with extended solos by the organist, pianist, and trumpet player. A female rabbi blew the shofar. Episcopalians and Methodists swapped “high-church low-church” inside jokes. A member of Dignity read scripture with gender-neutral language. A female chorus sang Gregorian chant. The ecumenical celebrants looked like the premise for a racist joke: a rabbi, a dashiki-clad minister, and a young white minister walked into a Methodist church.

Troy Perry, a gay man raised Baptist, who subsequently founded the predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church, delivered the sermon. “Turn to your neighbor. Say, ‘God bless you. You are in the right place/”

When I turned to my neighbor, a powerful religious hangover from the Church’s pre-Vatican II ban on attending Protestant services said,
No, you ain’t, brother
—
not the right place at all
.

Reverend Perry riled the New England crowd with a sermon of great length on healing and hope, in which Perry himself was a major character. White, northern, and predominantly Catholic, we weren’t quite sure how and when to punctuate Perry’s sermon with amens. It wasn’t because we weren’t willing; the amens swirled in our souls. But our timing needed work. Stray amens went off at odd moments, so that you couldn’t tell what exactly was being blessed or affirmed.

Several times, Reverend Perry even had to request amens when they didn’t spontaneously follow appropriate lines.

“Amen? Amen?” we called out.

Perry commented, laughing, that he had never heard amen spoken with a question mark.

For a while, it appeared we might escape the passing of the collection basket. But rather than announce in typical Catholic style, “Today’s collection will be for the support of curing knock knees among friars of the Order of Perpetual Motion,” a separate speaker gave an entirely new homily devoted solely to the topic of money. This second speaker, a Massachusetts legislator who tirelessly championed gay marriage, induced me to drop forty bucks in the collection plate. Only an hour later, at the Gay Pride cash-only block party, did I come to my senses. It felt like my pocket had been picked. A beer short, an hour late — isn’t that how the saying goes?

United Church of Vegetable

After Union United, I wanted an experience that involved fewer amens and wallet-thinning collections. Physically much larger than Union United, the Church of the Covenant occupied a block in Back Bay, one of Boston’s wealthiest zip codes. I imagined old-school Protestants inside, upright, stern, unemotional — with the numerals 666 tattooed at the hairline.

In stark contrast to Union United, the sanctuary at Church of the Covenant was nearly empty. In fact, I had sat down before I realized that the service was already in session. The ritual was as unstructured as if they had just made it up on the spot. Freelancing abounded, and the population was alarmingly vagrant. People leapt up mid-ceremony and visited with neighbors. One man ambled up to chat with the liturgical director during the sermon.

The vagrancy unnerved my Catholic soul. We tend to plunk down on our knees as soon as we arrive, and we don’t move until summoned to communion. Period. Lightning would strike us dead if we ever approached the altar unless we were carrying a collection basket or communion wine.

In the pew ahead of me, a little girl was clutching a carnation and a stuffed dog. She brought the dog with her during the service as she went around with the collection basket. People signed the dog with a felt-tipped pen, but no one ever explained its purpose.

Some strange Protestant rite from the Reformation, I decided.

A young, earnest minister speaking in a dead liberal monotone delivered the sermon. It lasted eons. Any friar worth his salt could have fit a half-dozen haiku homilies into the same space. Occasionally the earnest minister asked rhetorically: “What do you think?”

The performance was deeply unsatisfying. The priest was supposed to tell
me
what to think, damnit. That was his job, after all.

A wave of people swept toward the altar to offer celebrations and concerns, until virtually half the church was up front. They began with birthdays. Then someone mentioned the transformations that caused politicians to change their votes regarding gay marriage. Then Father’s Day got a plug. Then thanks for memorial flowers. Then thanks for the generosity of those who gave money to support a delegation to Congo. Then the story of a teenage daughter’s departure for Nicaragua for two summer months, including delayed planes. Then a young man announced that he was celebrating his own tenth anniversary of coming to the Church of the Covenant. “Thank you,” he said, “and please pray for my sister-in-law.” Sunday-school teachers. A married lesbian couple who were leaving the congregation and moving to western Massachusetts came to the altar for a group hug from the Nicaragua delegation.

Finally, everyone returned to their seats. The collection plate passed. Scraps of paper of all kinds filled it, and they weren’t all green.
No wonder they couldn’t even afford a decent statue of the Virgin
, I scoffed.
You can’t repair a roof with a thanksgiving note or a request for prayers
.

The mean part of me kept score of the defects in the UCC service, using the miniature golf pencils attached to the back of the pew:

• No space between the scripture lessons
  

• No call-and-response
  

• No thanks to God
  

• No garish Virgins — of the marble variety, anyway
  

• No votives
  

• Healthy goldfish
  

• No bloody crucifixes
  

• Nothing to eat, not a single wafer to be had
  

While I was tallying up the score, vagrancy overtook the service entirely. Everyone — my friend Richard, the liturgy director, the girl with the ritual stuffed dog, the anemic pastor — visited, hugged, chatted, and offered one another best wishes for the trip to Nicaragua.

Unbeknownst to me, the service had ended. There was no procession, no sending forth, no “This Mass is ended,” nothing whatever to signal our freedom. By the time I recovered and started hugging complete strangers, half the attendants — approximately seven people — were already clawing at the potluck table.

“Why so few people?” I asked my friend Richard.

“Oh, we take summers off. Not much goes on here.”

“Summers off from God?”

“By the way,” he said, dodging my skepticism, “if you want meat, you’ve got to bring it yourself and eat in the corner while looking shameful. It’s a congregation of vegetarians.”

That was the last straw. A church that took time off from God and eschewed garish Virgins was one thing, but vegetarianism lay beyond the pale. I prayed to God to send me a religion like He sent Joseph Smith — one that was fully formed, replete with stone tablets, and tithing-based, so I wouldn’t have to rely on putting fraudsters in jail or writing memoirs to earn a living.

DisCouraged

After spending so many Sundays with Protestants other than my boyfriend, I decided to spend some quality time with Courage, the Vatican-approved Roman Catholic group for gay men. Courage emphasizes lives of chastity, and I had nothing to lose. The way things were going with Scott, I was already pretty much a celibate.

Tracking the group down proved almost impossible. Visitors to the Oval Office cope with fewer security procedures than Courage employed.

I called the archdiocese and reached a lovely lady in the Office of Spiritual Direction.

“I’m looking for Courage,” I said. I might as well have asked for the Department of Burnings at the Stake.

“I don’t think that exists anymore,” she said.

“But they have a Web site,” I explained. “It lists this number.”

“Oh. OK. I’ll check around and get back to you.”

She never did.

So I turned to a snitch with whom I occasionally sparred on the Internet. “Alice, I’m having a conversion experience. How do I get in touch with Courage?”

Pleased but skeptical, Alice provided contact information. A couple of e-mails to Courage failed to elicit a reply. One more try, I vowed, then I will declare myself officially disCouraged.

An anonymous reply signed “Boston Courage” followed my third attempt. Further e-mail exchanges gave me a name: “Dan.”“^ Dan supplied me with his phone number but offered no information concerning the meetings, as if afraid to commit this dangerous information to writing.

On the phone Dan sounded like John Ratzenberger, the actor who played Cliff the mailman from the TV show
Cheers
— but with a more authentic Boston accent. Gruff but friendly, he told me the name of the church where Courage met, but he could not remember the street, which I had to look up myself.

The Courage group was hanging out in the parking lot like a bunch of high school thugs when I arrived. We descended into the basement and formed a circle of folding chairs. Courage meetings take their format from programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. After the opening prayer, the members introduce themselves, first names only, and read aloud the five goals of Courage, which primarily involve neutralizing SSA.”* Then a member presented a meditation on one of the twelve steps, followed by other members offering their own reflections on the step. Those with a “burning desire to share” could take the floor next, and the meeting closed with a Hail Mary, as if the group was trying to land the airplane of their celibacy in the storm of their sexuality.

Ten men had come, about average. Dan, a lumbering man with the amused air of someone who has learned to laugh at the cruel God who turned him gay, wore Coke-bottle glasses. “Ewald” wore a yellow golf shirt and Wrangler jeans — both visibly ironed — and his face betrayed an eagerness to be just one of the guys.* Ewald was the kind of guy who took religiously his mother’s admonitions to wash behind his ears and wear clean underwear every day because you never knew when you were going to be in an accident.

The only other newbie gave the name “Ben.” Classically effeminate in a computer-nerd sort of way, he had grown a thin beard to cover his chinlessness. He claimed to be a crossover, both a convert to Catholicism and, more dubiously, a veteran of girls.

As Ewald gave a presentation on the day’s step, I focused on Ben. The name had to be a pseudonym.
Why Ben? Short for Benjamin, a
martyr? Or Benedict? Maybe he was a big pope-aholic? Or could it have been Ben-there, done that, referring to the gay lifestyle?

I had come to the meeting equipped with only my actual name. It hadn’t occurred to me to take on a saint or martyr I had always wanted to be. Fernando seemed a little over the top.
But I could have been a Crispin
I reflected.
Or a Justus, Then if I became a member of the Supreme Court, they would call me Justice Justus. How odd that only one of my siblings
—
the
one born in Ireland
—
got a saints name. We American -born children got nothing. Scott? Who ever heard of Saint Scott? The Pearly Gates were going to pose a serious challenge without a proper saint to pull strings for me
.

When my reverie ended, the whole circle of celibates was looking at me expectantly. Uh-oh.

“It’s your turn,” Dan said.

My turn — right — to reflect on the step about which Ewald had been eulogizing for the past ten minutes, a step about which I knew nothing. In fact, the whole staircase was a mystery to me, except for my vague notion it involved lots of apologizing, soul-searching, and making amends at some point. It was surprisingly tricky to find some honest middle ground that did not imply condemnation of homosexual activity or endorse the concept of SSA as a twelve-steppable offence.

The arrival of Courage’s chaplain got me off the hook. Full of bonhomie and casual charm, Father John was a man’s man — forty years old, movie-star handsome, a strong handshake, and a tough South Boston accent. He looked a shade too cool for school, but proved warm and genuinely interested. A lot of the celibate boys surely developed serious crushes on him.

The Church really is determined to torture these guys. They couldn’t have chosen a little ninety-year-old eunuch as chaplain? Instead they assign this virile stud?

Father John, who insisted he doesn’t suffer from SSA, later admitted to me that when he first became chaplain, he had feared getting hit on. He thought, What happens if they fall in love with me and I feel all weird? “I used to call people faggots,” he confessed.

But he said the phobic feelings had disappeared: “It is what it is. I don’t care what people think or say. There’s a clear understanding that the love I have for these guys is platonic like Jesus would have with his disciples. They know I am looking out for their good. I have affection for these guys.”